8 Beginner Tips To Reach Fitness and Health Goals

Whether you want to change your diet and eat nutritious foods, get fit or just improve your health status by building healthier lifestyle habits, you need to follow a concrete plan that will fit your lifestyle needs and help you achieve success with your goals.

Strong inner motivation, knowledge about the relationship between food, sport and your body, and a few useful tips will help you make the first step in changing your habitual lifestyle and successfully achieve lifestyle goals! Just starting your first fitness journey on your own. Read our 8 recommendations for beginners to find out how to achieve your ultimate fitness and health goals!

Define The Reason Why You Want to Change

Being fit and healthy is a long-term commitment that requires constant work to achieve all of your fitness or health goals. But before you start, it is essential to determine the main goal and why you want to make such changes to your habitual lifestyle and then come up with a concrete plan for action.

Why do so?

The answer is the intrinsic motivation that will drive you to move forward and progress every time! The sense of inner motivation will make it easier to make a long-term commitment to exercise regularly, eat healthy and nutritious food, be active and form new behaviours that will eventually help you become the best version of yourself! 

Set Up a List of Consistent Goals

Once you've identified the reason for what you want to change in your lifestyle and why it is time to plan how to kickstart your new healthy lifestyle journey by writing down a list of goals. The goals you set will boost your motivation, allow you to measure your progress and see how much you have achieved. Remember, it should be attainable and realistic, as not being able to reach your goals might be discouraging, upsetting and make you give up faster. Don't overwhelm yourself! If you want to get in shape through fitness, set a goal to train at least three days a week to allow your body to recover and get enough energy for another workout. 

It is better to keep a journal or track it on your phone to make sure you achieve your small goals weekly and get timely notifications to avoid skipping your routine plans.

Clean Up Your Diet

Perhaps one of the hardest parts of changing your lifestyle to a healthy one is eating healthy. It's easier to grab something on the go or get food delivery if you're hungry and running out of time to cook.

However, eating healthy is not just about your weight - it is far more complex. Healthy, nutritious foods provide more energy to your body, improve your overall health status, increase productivity, reduce the risk of various diseases and health conditions, improve mood.

Changing your eating habits is difficult, so better to start by taking baby steps and setting realistic goals. Don't strive to shift to a clean diet in one day. It will only increase your cravings for unhealthy foods. Instead, make this shift gradual and smooth and let your body and taste receptors adapt to new foods. Don't be too strict with yourself. Eating healthy is about learning a sense of balance and still allowing yourself to enjoy the food you like but in moderate amounts. 

Stay Flexible

Even when we plan our whole week, as we know, everything in life is unpredictable, and often things cannot go as planned. Don't panic! Even if you have to skip your morning HIIT or evening Pilates class, just do a short full-body workout in the gym or at home. If you have a short business trip, where you will have to miss a whole week of training, take it easy. Just don't stop where you stopped, and don't exhaust yourself with many hours of training to get it done! Continue your workouts in your usual mode. Consistency is the key and not the amount of sweat you lose. Being flexible in your routine will help you stay motivated even during unforeseen situations.

Give yourself time to recover

Recovery time is just as important as the time you put into your workouts. Each workout puts a lot of strain and stress on the muscles and the whole body, so it's essential to give your body enough time to recover. Your body needs to replenish the energy sources required for the next workout and help you to avoid overexertion ad burnout. Incorrect or insufficient recovery can also negatively affect your motivation, but more importantly, it can lower your fitness level, negatively affect your performance, and cause injuries.

Proper hydration and nutrition are also part of recovery, so aim to give your body the fuel it needs to recover every time.

Find someone to support and motivate you

Get support from your friends and family. Find at least one person who might share your idea of changing their lifestyles and forming better habits. Make a weekly plan for workouts, meal plans, and other physical activities and share this plan with your partner-in-crime. In this way, you will be responsible for each other and provide support and motivation when one of you starts falling from the track. 

Prioritise Sleep

Sleep has enormous restorative power for your body and mind. It gives your body time to recover, reserve energy, repair and support muscle growth. Not getting enough sleep puts you at risk of burnout and exhaustion, plus it puts you back from achieving new progress in your fitness routine if you sacrifice recovery time. 

Aim to create a sleep schedule where you will get 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night and organize the rest based on this schedule. 

Embrace the deeply restorative powers of sleep for your body and mind and use it to your benefit.

Avoid Procrastination

If you need to skip a workout for any reason, try not to let it happen for more than one day in a row. This will help you keep the consistency of your workouts, which will later help you develop a daily habit. If you have a long day ahead of you, try exercising in the morning, so you can tick off your workout from your to-do list and start your day with a boost of energy.

Even a regular 15-minute run is better than nothing at all. The main thing is not to postpone for later, but to keep moving forward!

Don't forget to reward yourself! Once you reach the desired fitness level, be proud of your hard work. Fitness and healthy habits deserve to be part of your lifestyle because they can only improve your life.